On Wednesday, we'll return to the broad topic of standard language ideology. The two chapters from Rosina Lippi-Green's English with an Accent
address the definition of Standard English, language subordination, and
the communicative burden. Peter Trudgill's article tackles the
definition of Standard English by first talking through what Standard
English is not.
If you have time tonight, it would be great if you could post some of your responses to the readings here. The easiest possibility: just take one or two assertions/passages/ideas from the
readings and respond to them here. And/or please respond to each other's posts. Feel free to do so just as comments on this post.
And if the readings raise any specific questions you would like to make sure we address tomorrow in class, please note those.
And if the readings raise any specific questions you would like to make sure we address tomorrow in class, please note those.
Thanks!
Lippi-Green asserts that one effect of standard language ideologies is to commoditize language (61) and, later, she draws attention to the ways that individuals who consider themselves to be speakers of a standard variation of the language feel justified in "rejecting the communicative burden" (73) when interacting with another speaker who is viewed as speaking a non-standard form. Both of these suggestions prompted me to go find this NPR story that aired yesterday about a computer-based applicant screening system that recommends job candidates based on voice samples.
ReplyDelete(Full link here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2015/03/23/394827451/now-algorithms-are-deciding-whom-to-hire-based-on-voice)
Many of Lippi-Green's assertions in today's readings press hard to the boundaries of her argument. The reader might well think, "Hmmm. I don't quite see language as a commodity -- I mean, don't we all have ready access to it?" or, "I would never just shut down listening to another speaker because of language patterns." But the very power of the ideology, of course, lies in its invisibility -- our unawareness of the ways they operate at all times and all around us. The NPR story confidently asserts that the voice screening software "does not factor in things like age, race, gender, or sexual orientation." But why would we expect the system to *not* be trained to favor the most standard form of the language -- screening and rejecting, in turn, those forms that vary from it? (Indeed, Crystal's discussion of listener bias in radio at 473-474 offers just one example that probably informs the kind of screening this type of algorithm is likely to perform.)
I found the Trudgill article to be helpful overall, if often frustrating in the way it repeatedly dismantled my existing working definitions for Standard English. The section “Grammatical idiosyncrasies of Standard English” was particularly effective in its reduction of SE to a set of features “rather few in number, although… very significant socially,” and to see these standardized features explicitly labeled as irregularities and deviations from the norm was a welcome change of pace (125). Yet however appealing it may be to see the elusive Standard English laid out in a bulleted list – the eight most disproportionately powerful dialectal features in English – I can’t help but feel skeptical about this minimalism. In particular, I’m left unsatisfied by his dismissal of vocabulary as an indicator of linguistic standardness – especially after seeing Lippi-Green quote the Merriam-Webster definition of SAE, which does acknowledge vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteTrudgill claims – not without some hedging – that “there is no such thing as Standard English vocabulary,” as no words are endemic only to Standard English (127). Yet there must be something of a standard-with-a-lower-case-s English vocabulary. Trudgill offers the sentence “The old man was bloody knackered after his long trip” as an instance of “a Standard English sentence, couched in a very informal style” (121). On a purely syntactical level, it is clearly Standard English, but as a speaker of Standard American English I flag the British idioms immediately, and barely register the standard syntax. And I wouldn’t even argue, as Trudgill does, that the Standard English vocabulary is that which is “available to all,” and that words belonging to non-standard dialects are in some way supplements to this universal lexicon (127). Perhaps it’s only because I still have Hiberno-English on the brain, but in trying to define a Standard English vocabulary I thought of the scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which the Irish protagonist, who at this point in the novel is already a very competent user of English, fails to recognize the word funnel when used by an English dean; the Hiberno-English word for this object, which the dean does not recognize, is tundish. Here standardized word choice is not so simple as in Trudgill’s case of cry and blar, in which the standard word is readily available to the dialect speaker. In Joyce’s example, the standard word is something alien, something to be acquired, something that displaces a familiar word – is it not, for the Hiberno-English speaker, something peculiar to Standard English?
“When speakers of devalued or stigmatized varieties of English consent to the standard language ideology, they become complicit in its propagation against themselves, their own interests and identities. Many are caught in a vacuum: If an individual cannot find any social acceptance for her language outside her own speech communities, she may come to denigrate her own language, even while she continues to use it” (p. 68)
ReplyDeleteThis excerpt taken from the Lippi-Green article really stuck out to me on several levels. It was further emphasized in her piece that the schools are the ‘heart of standardization’ of the English language. Therefore, this process of self-evaluating in terms of language and identity can really commence at a very young age. Thinking in teacher role, it’s scary to consider that the manifestation of one’s teaching can have profound effects on students and their individual perspectives. Educators are required to instill a certain curriculum or set of standards and yet the teaching of language is a very sensitive subject matter that needs to be reflected on by all teachers. It is crucial that students are being taught the standard language in a format that is not so blatantly discrediting the other language dialects. I have found myself constantly thinking about the many avenues that could be taken in teaching language and wonder how it can best be taught. Another class of mine, I feel, presented an article that nicely ties into this inquiry of teaching and language ideology. It was entitled, Preparing Teachers for Dialectally Diverse Classrooms, in which similar issues and questions are raised within the school system.